Parliamentary involvement, party ideology and majority-opposition bargaining: Belgian participation in multinational military operations

ABSTRACT

This article examines the impact of parliamentary involvement in troop deployment decisions on restrictions on military mandates by examining the Belgian contribution to the 2011 Libya intervention and the coalition against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. More specifically, we analyse (1) the effect of party ideology on mandate preferences, and (2) the impact of bargaining between majority and opposition parties on the outcome of mandate negotiations. Our case study demonstrates that left-wing parties show a strong inclination toward imposing restrictions on the use of military force beyond humanitarian goals, while right-wing preferences tend to depend on the national interests at stake in the operation. With regard to majority-opposition bargaining, our study shows that the impact of opposition parties is dependent on the degree of contention between government and opposition parties, as well as on the extent to which the executive needs to seek support across its own majority.

KEYWORDS:

• Caveats
• coalition warfare
• political parties
• legislative-executive relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daan Fonck is a doctoral research fellow at the Leuven International and European Studies Institute at KU Leuven. His research focuses on the European Parliament’s diplomacy and on parliamentary control of foreign and security policy, and has been published in Cooperation and Conflict, Parliamentary Affairs, and Journal of Common Market Studies.

Tim Haesebrouck is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. He finished his Ph.D. on European military operations in 2016. His research interests include military intervention, defence burden sharing, the Responsibility to Protect, and the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy. His work has been published in Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Policy Analysis, Journal of European Public Policy, and Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Yf Reykers is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leuven International and European Studies Institute at KU Leuven, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in 2017. He was a visiting scholar at New York University and Aarhus University. His research focuses on multinational military operations, and has been published in amongst others European Security, International Peacekeeping, and Parliamentary Affairs.

ORCID

Daan Fonck http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9639-5315

Yf Reykers http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0080-1815

Notes

1. In contrast, the study of Haesebrouck (2018) on the pattern of participation in the air strikes against the Islamic State suggests that parliamentary veto power is a relevant condition for military deployment decisions, irrespective of partisan politics.

2. Interviews with members of parliament, Brussels, July 6–7, 2015; Interview with former defense cabinet official, Brussels March 21, 2016.